After studying these matters for years, I've concluded that the
"improved text", so-called, that Hort & Co. introduced was not an
improvement at all, but a total and unqualified DISASTER -- far
inferior to the traditional Majority/Byzantine text.

THE EMPTY SHELL OF WESTCOTT & HORT

by Yuri Kuchinsky

Dr. Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-1892) has been a highly influential
figure in biblical history, although very few of today's Christians
have even heard about him. He and his partner Brooke Foss Westcott
(1825-1903) were responsible for the greatest feat in biblical textual
criticism. They were responsible for undermining the text of the
Authorised Version (the KJV), which led to its eventual abandonment by
all mainstream Christian Churches.

KJV New Testament was, of course, based on the Greek text that is
known as the Majority/Byzantine text. This is the traditional text

that the Church copied and preserved throughout the centuries. And
yet, mainly because of Hort (who was the guiding light of this dynamic
duo), this traditional text was abandoned, and it was replaced... with
Hort's own creation! So this was published first in 1881, and it took
the world by storm. As a result, almost every modern translation of
the gospels (such as the RSV, NIV, NASB, etc.) is based essentially on
Hort's Greek text -- the text that did not even exist before the 19th
century!

So then what was the basis of Hort's 1881 edition? It was based on a
small handful of Egyptian Greek manuscripts dated to the 4th and 5th
centuries. But there are many problems with these manuscripts, because
they constantly disagree with each other -- in thousands of
passages... So how did he decide which of them to use for any
particular verse of his brand-new text that he was building up?
Essentially, when all is said and done, he based his decisions upon
his own authority.

As a result, in the 4 gospels alone, Hort's text has about 6000
differences from the traditional Byzantine text. Many of these
differences are very substantial indeed, and affect all sorts of
matters of biblical interpretation. And it is all based on the
authority of Hort (plus a few other scholars who collaborated with
him).

So this is what the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars, as
well the majority of the rank-and-file Christians, of course, still
use today...

Now, to be sure, the overwhelming majority of today's biblical
scholars don't really know all that much about NT textual criticism
(and this fact is well known among the actual text critical
_specialists_, of which there are very few indeed). Most NT scholars
simply follow in the footsteps of those who taught them, and they of
course also relied on Westcott & Hort's Greek text in their
interpretative work. So this is a new "tradition" that Hort created,
and it is very rarely if at all questioned today in the halls of
academe. But I'm saying that the whole thing was nothing but a MASSIVE
DELUSION.

After studying these matters for years, I've concluded that the
"improved text", so-called, that Hort & Co. introduced was not an
improvement at all, but a total and unqualified DISASTER -- far
inferior to the traditional Majority/Byzantine text.


WHOSE AUTHORITY?

So, in the final analysis, this whole attempted "improvement", which
resulted in all these "modern" translations of the gospels, was really
based on Hort's own personal authority. He was the leader in that late
19th century movement to dump the traditional text of the gospels. As
I say, there are many thousands of disagreements among these 4 or 5
Egyptian manuscripts that he was primarily using and, in each single
one of these cases, it was Hort, himself, who had to make a decision
as to what goes into his text, and what stays out of it.

Of course, in his many writings, Hort did try to offer some sort of a
scientific justification for all these editorial changes that he was
making -- thousands upon thousands of them. He did try to formulate a
variety of theories about the Majority text; about his beloved
Egyptian manuscripts; about how all of these derived; their
hypothetical sources; their interrelationships, and about the
historical settings for all these developments. But the problem is
that, over the years... virtually all of his theories have now been
completely abandoned by the mainstream textual critics!

And so, nobody is any longer taking seriously his "Neutral text"
theory, or his "Alexandrian text" theory, or his "Syrian recension"
theory... It is generally known that he never actually applied his
vaunted genealogical method to real manuscripts (as opposed to the
hypothetical ones)... The criticisms that he levelled at the Majority
text, such as his theories about the supposed "conflations" and
"harmonisations" within it have all been answered very competently by
highly skilful textual scholars such as Robinson and Pickering...

Thus, it is very clear by now that Hort didn't have the history of the
text -- all of his explanations as to how and in what historical
circumstances our earliest manuscripts and text-types originated are
now universally rejected. He never produced a general stemma of the
earliest Greek manuscripts -- in fact, no such stemma has been
produced even up to the present day. (A stemma is a diagram that shows
the parent/child relationships between various manuscripts of an
ancient work.)

There's virtually nothing left out there of Hort's original
theorising, what actually _paved the way_ for that big 19th century
take down of the Majority text... There's nothing left there at all
but an Empty Shell!

So this is what we have left then, ladies and gentlemen -- the Empty
Shell of Hort's theories... And yet, in some strange and miraculous
way, his Greek text still lingers on in academic circles, as if there
were nothing wrong with it at all! (As Robinson notes, the latest
edition of Nestle/Aland, this mainstream academic Greek NT, is still
99.5% identical to Hort's original creation.) So, by now, this brazen
impostor has acquired the status of something like a new "Received
Text" -- a hollow effigy that everybody is afraid to touch. Like some
sort of a man-made idol, it is sitting there on its grand pedestal,
and staring at all of us with its beady eyes... There's really nothing
there but one big and empty DELUSION!

What an amazing failure that was -- a "Splendid Failure"!

It was not I, of course, who first came up with this "Splendid
Failure" sobriquet in regard to Hort's Greek text -- it was none other
than Prof. Kirsopp Lake, a highly respected textual critic. Lake said
this all the way back in 1904, after considering many of these same
matters that I've already mentioned above. According to Lake, Hort's
text "was one of those failures which are more important than most
successes". (I suppose what he meant was that Hort's was a worthwhile
attempt at assembling a modern critical text of the NT, and yet, in
the end, it failed spectacularly.)


HORT CONVICTS HIMSELF IN HIS OWN WORDS

In any case, in this article, I will not try to get into any of those
technical details of why Hort failed, and how he failed. Competent
critics have already written whole books about these matters, and some
of them can even be read for free on the Net.

[Here are some relevant links for those who want to confirm these
matters for themselves. While, myself, as a supporter of the Semitic
textual tradition, I don't necessarily agree with all of the arguments
that Pickering and Robinson are making, I find that most of their
criticisms of Hort are right on target.

"The Identity of the New Testament Text II", by Wilbur N. Pickering,
ThM PhD; see especially Chapters 4 and 6,
http://www.revisedstandardversion.net/text/WNP/index.html

Robinson, The case for Byzantine priority
http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/vol06/Robinson2001.html ]

What I will do now instead is focus on one specific quote from Hort
that seems extremely revealing... This quote alone shows quite well
that Hort really was a Fraud.

Either he was a fraud or severely deluded -- it doesn't really matter
which... The following quote reall goes a long way to demonstrate
just how spectacularly wrong he was in his theorising about his
"original text of the gospels" -- about his attempts to reconstruct
such a text. This matter has to do with the fundamental question of
what motivated the ancient scribes when they introduced changes to the
text of the gospels.

Everybody who has ever bothered to read anything about NT textual
criticism will of course know that even our best ancient manuscripts
show massive variations among them. It is only the late medieval
manuscripts that are relatively free of variations. As has been
noticed by critic after critic, the earliest manuscripts are
particularly rife with variation.

So what sorts of variations are they? There are many types of them, of
course. A lot of them just seem like scribal mistakes, or perhaps some
minor attempts at stylistic improvement. But there are also many
attempted theological corrections and emendations of all sorts, that
one can see there...

There's nothing surprising in this, of course, because, in the early
centuries, there had been many well-attested theological disputes
among various orthodox and proto-orthodox factions. Some early fathers
like Tertullian were first seen as orthodox, but then they became
"heretics". Some "heretics" repented of their heresies, and became
orthodox. And some commentators, like Origen, were seen as fully
orthodox by some Christians of their time, but as "heretics" by
others. All of that is part of history. It is clear that the theology
of the young movement was still evolving, so naturally there were
disputes, and many of these disputes found their reflection in early
gospel manuscripts.

So one would assume that it is very important to be sensitive to these
things, right? A serious scholar cannot fail but pay attention to
these early theological disputes, and how they may have affected
copying and editing of various gospel passages... Seems only logical.

But what if a textual critic refused even to _acknowledge_ such a
possibility, i.e. that some of the variations in our early manuscripts
were due to theological considerations? Well, I, for one, wouldn't
trust such a critic much... In my view, to all intents and purposes,
such a critic has already disqualified him or herself as an objective
commentator on these matters. But this is exactly what Drs. Westcott &
Hort have done!

So this is what they said in their famous 1881 edition of the New
Testament; here is the quote that exposes them as out and out frauds
and/or incompetents,

"It will not be out of place to add here a distinct expression of our
belief that even among the numerous unquestionably spurious readings
of the New Testament there are no signs of deliberate falsification of
the text for dogmatic purposes." (Westcott and Hort, "The New
Testament in the Original Greek", London: Macmillan and Co., 1881,
Vol. 2, p. 282)

What an amazing blooper! The meaning of this, essentially, is that
there was NO EDITING OF THE GOSPELS AT ALL BASED ON THEOLOGICAL
CONSIDERATIONS!

And in order to show just how _bizarre_ this statement is, here are
the views of some other eminent textual critics -- some of the great
TC authorities commenting on this same matter,

Griesbach:

"The New Testament abounds in more losses, additions, and
interpolations, purposely introduced, than any other book."

Hug:

"the New Testament has had the peculiar fate of suffering more by
intentional alterations than the works of profane literature"

Colwell:

"The majority of the variant readings in the New Testament were
created for theological or dogmatic reasons."

Ehrman:

Ehrman's recent book on the subject is entitled "The Orthodox
Corruption of Scripture". Its title speaks for itself.

So preposterous is this "belief" that Hort had expressed that it came
to be attacked from all sides -- both by the conservative KJV
supporters, and by the textual scholars of a more liberal bent. As far
as the criticism from the conservatives goes, they were very eager to
point to the "heretics" who were certainly known to corrupt the
Scriptures in order to suit their doctrinal purposes, as the
statements of numerous early fathers indicate. Such statements were
made, for example, by Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Tertullian,
Eusebius, and by quite a few others. Marcion was probably the first
such heretic who was widely accused of remodelling the Gospel of Luke,
and the epistles of Paul according to his own preferences. Origen also
noted how often all sorts of scribes in his time corrupted the
scriptures.

And the more liberal scholars, who of course all warmly accept Hort's
baby, his reconstruction of the "Original Greek New Testament" (while
at the same time rejecting most of the theories that served as the
foundation for it!), were only too happy to point to the _orthodox_
editors and scribes as the ones with a certain penchant for
"fine-tuning" the Scriptures. The above mentioned study by Ehrman is a
case in point -- a whole volume filled to the brim with examples of
such tampering.

But we don't really need the _modern_ scholars to alert us to such a
tendency on the part of orthodox scribes (Ehrman's book can by no
means be seen as any sort of a big radical breakthrough in this area).
This phenomenon was already commented upon specifically even by the
fifth century Church father Epiphanius, for example, who stated that
some Orthodox copiers of his time deleted "he wept" from Luke 19:41
"out of jealousy for the Lord's divinity".

And so, what Hort said above was simply a denial of history -- an
attempt to filter reality, and to fit it into his own private mould,
so it doesn't conflict with his own peculiar ideology. It sure seems
like his ideology included a belief that the Christian faith is
immutable, and that the Christian doctrine had never undergone any
significant historical development at all... Only under such
conditions can his words begin to make any sense at all... Indeed,
_only_ if the Christian doctrine is immutable, and has always been so
-- only then it would never occur to anyone to change anything about
its particulars in a deliberate way, such as by trying to "fine-tune"
the text of the gospels...

So this is the scholar who had the final authority in deciding how our
"modern" text of the gospels is supposed to read today... This is the
scholar who had to make big decisions about which manuscript reading
to adopt in thousands upon thousands of passages!

Is this really the authority that anyone should trust with the work of
reconstructing the earliest text of the gospels? Not I. I don't trust
Hort at all.


CONCLUSION

So this one sure does seem like a truly bizarre story... The whole
thing really does look mighty strange... The traditional text of the
gospels had been hijacked by a severely deluded (if not a completely
fraudulent) ideologue, and replaced by a manifestly inferior product
_of his own creation_! And in spite of the warnings from many highly
reputable biblical commentators about Hort's failure (such as from
Prof. Lake above), this misbegotten fraud still rules our academic New
Testament studies today in a completely arbitrary and dictatorial way!

As an experiment, try to ask any mainstream biblical scholar about any
of these matters, and see what you get in reply. My bet is that he or
she will stare at you in a totally blank way, as if you've just fell
on earth from Planet Zircon. It never even occurred to them that
something might be wrong with their beloved Nestle/Aland's Greek text,
which is of course 99.5% identical to Hort's creation!

Dear, oh dear... I don't think that the world has seen such a blatant
and manifest imposture since that day long ago when Caligula made his
favourite horse a Roman senator.

And hundreds of millions Christians around the world today still rely
upon this text to teach them about the True Religion... A strange and
bizarre story, this one...

You know how it is in biblical studies... Scholars often argue till
blue in the face about the correct interpretation of _one single word_
in the Bible. They write whole books about some difficult _phrase_,
that they are trying to explain. And here we have the whole 6000 words
and phrases that Hort has changed around in one fell swoop... And
nobody seems to care about it much!

Strange and weird.

Regards,

Yuri.

Baqqesh shalom verodpehu -- Seek peace and pursue it (Psalm 34:15)

Yuri Kuchinsky -- http://www.trends.ca/~yuku -- Toronto